2001 Gibson 57 Historic Electronics Enquiry

[kjh2196]

Hi folks,

Recently, I just bought my first Gibson guitar and a dream guitar of mine, a 2001 Gibson Historic Collection '57 Les Paul Custom specifically. So I opened it up just to check if everything is in order and I realised the wires of the 57 Classic humbuckers seemed different from the usual silver braided wires that Gibson uses.

Instead of the usual silver braided wire, mine has these insulated black wires connected from the humbuckers to the control cavity. Can someone tell me more about it, such as if this has been re-worked before, aftermarkets and etc., as I am very (and genuinely) curious about it.

Thanks in advance.

(As highlighted in the red box, it uses black insulated wire and it's pretty taut so I couldn't really pull out the pickup)

(Neck pickup - please excuse the bad angle as the wire is pretty tight, so I was forced to take the picture at an awkward angle)

(Bridge pickup - once again, bad picture due to taut wiring. I think it's safe to assume it is genuine 57 classic pickups?)

(Control cavity - the black insulated wire from the 57 classic humbuckers can be seen better in the control cavity. I don't know much about the electronics used here. All I know is that it uses CTS 500k pots.)

Once again, thanks for checking out my (first) post here

 

[ARandall]

This has been re-wired....pots and caps are not stock Gibson components. But the braided pickup leads look to have simply been covered in heatshrink.

 

[kjh2196]

This has been re-wired....pots and caps are not stock Gibson components. But the braided pickup leads look to have simply been covered in heatshrink.

Thanks for your input! The previous owner probably replaced them due to old age...
That's what I suspect regarding the wiring too since all the 57 classic humbuckers I looked up, none has heatshrink. I assume it's fine/better to continue leave it as it is??

 

[ARandall]

Yep. No inherent issues with the component quality.
Depending on your preferences then pot values and taper are reasons to swap individual components out.

 

[none2low]

IMO - Someone either had this setup with push pull pots at one point in its life (for split humbuckers) or had some kind of phase switching.

I can see no other reason why someone would go through all the effort to remove and replace all the 2-conductor braided just to replace it with individual cloth braided wiring.

Either that or someone had some sort of cloth braided wire fetish.